Reviews

From: Indie Music [url]
Date: November 5, 2005

Artist: Terami Hirsch
CD: Entropy 29

Home: Burbank, California

Style: Classical Pop

Quote: "This is darkly dramatic orchestral pop, which flows so naturally with the occasionally unsettling lyrics and earnest, yearning vocal that Hirsch does so well."

By Jennifer Layton

In my review of Terami Hirsch's last CD, To the Bone, I criticized her foray into techno territory. The artificial sounds did not match her warm voice and poetic lyrics. This time, on Entropy 29, she's experimenting with a gothic/classical sound, and now my world makes sense again. This works. This is darkly dramatic orchestral pop, which flows so naturally with the occasionally unsettling lyrics and earnest, yearning vocal that Hirsch does so well. This is her best album yet.

This CD feels like going to the opera and seeing tormented spirits floating through the audience. It's like watching an art school film with a soundtrack by Kate Bush. Delicate ballads with piano notes that fall like raindrops. Lyrics that are sometimes nightmarish. But then, Hirsch has never been any other way. She puts her visions right up front in the opening track, "Mission to the Moon":

Shattered in my mouth
There are splinters in these words
Thorns and roots and tangles
I have spoken
Then spitting out my teeth
Into a little silver cup
I wake up cold with eyes wide open ...


I'm glad I'm listening to this CD in daylight.

I noticed a common theme in these tracks – the strength of something small in the face of something overwhelming. "Little Light," a song about a small flame holding back the darkness, feels like a song of a small spirit holding its own in a big dark world. Then there’s the line in "Drifting": "My spine of glass won’t hold our fractured form."

Lush and theatrical, Hirsch's music holds nothing back. She is a bold, brave artist, pouring everything out of her soul, even when it makes me worry about her sanity. "Memory Picture" offers lyrics of emotional torment and probably some mental illness. If she didn't have the music in which to find refuge, I'd be using the online Yellow Pages to find suicide watch counselors in Burbank and telling them to keep their eyes open. But there is beauty and magic here, enveloping the pain and soothing the soul. Hirsch is finding her own way with this CD, a small spirit holding her own in this big dark world.